Marry Me

PENGUIN BOOKS

Marry Me

John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker; since 1957 he has lived in Massachusetts. He is the author of twenty-one novels as well as numerous collections of short stories, poems and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.

JOHN UPDIKE

Marry Me

A Romance

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the USA 1976
Published in Great Britain by André Deutsch 1977
Published in Penguin Books 1977
Published as a Penguin Red Classic 2006
1

Copyright © John Updike, 1971, 1973, 1976
All rights reserved

Chapter 1
has been previously published as a booklet by the Albondocani Press (New York, 1973).
Chapter 2
appeared, in somewhat different form, in the
New Yorker.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Peer International Corporation for permission to reprint lyrics on pages 1 and 102 from the song ‘Born to Lose’ by Ted Daffan. Copyright 1943 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

978-0-14-191990-4

Choose me your valentine,
Next, let us marry –
Love to the death will pine
If we long tarry.

ROBERT HERRICK

Chapters

1
Warm Wine

Along this overused coast of Connecticut, the beach was a relatively obscure one, reached by a narrow asphalt road kept in only fair repair and full of unexplained forks and windings and turnings-off. At most of the ambiguous turns, little weathered wooden arrows bearing the long Indian name of the beach indicated the way, but some of these signs had fallen into the grass, and the first time – an idyllic, unseasonably mild day in March – that the couple agreed to meet here, Jerry got lost and was half an hour late.

Today, too, Sally had arrived ahead of him. He had been delayed by the purchase of a bottle of wine and an attempt, unsuccessful, to buy a corkscrew. Her graphite-grey Saab sat in a far corner of the parking lot, by itself. He slithered his own car, an old Mercury convertible, close to it, hoping to see her sitting waiting at the wheel, for ‘Born to Lose’, as sung by Ray Charles, had come onto his car radio.

Every dream
Has only brought me pain!…

She brimmed in this song for him; he had even framed the words he would use to call her into his car to listen
with him: ‘Hey. Hi. Come quick and hear a neat record.’ He had grown to affect with her an adolescent manner of speech, mixed of hip slang and calf-love monosyllables. Songs on the radio were rich with new meaning for him, as he drove to one of their trysts. He wanted to share them with her, but they were rarely in the same car together, and as week succeeded week that spring the songs like mayflies died from the air.

Her Saab was empty; Sally was not in sight. She must be up in the dunes. The beach was unusually shaped: an arc of flat washed sand perhaps half a mile long was bounded at both ends by congregations of great streaked yellowish rocks, and up from the nearer sets of rocks a high terrain of dunes and beach scruff and wandering paths held like a vast natural hotel hundreds of private patches of sand. This realm of hollows and ridges was deceptively complex. Each time, they were unable to find the exact place, the perfect place, where they had been before.

He climbed the steep dune before him hurriedly, not taking the time to remove his shoes and socks. His panting under the effort of running uphill seemed delicious to him; it was the taste of his renewed youth, his renewed draft on life. Since the start of their affair he was always running, hurrying, creating time where no time had been needed before; he had become an athlete of the clock, bending odd hours into an unprecedented and unsuspected second life. He had given up smoking; he wanted his kisses to taste clean.

Jerry came into the high land of dunes and was frightened, for there was no sign of her. There was no sign of anyone. Besides their two, less than a dozen cars were
scattered through the great parking lot. In another month, this lot would be crammed, the boarded-up snack-bar-and-bathhouse building would be alive with brazen bodies and canned music, and the dunes would be too hot to inhabit. Today the dunes still wore the look, inherited from winter, of clean-swept Nature, never tasted. When she called to him the sound came fluted by the cool air like a birdcall. ‘Jerry?’ It was a question, though if she could see him she must know it was he. ‘Jerry? Hey?’

Turning, he saw her now, on a dune above him, in the two-piece yellow bathing suit; as she descended, her eyes downcast to avoid pricking her bare feet on the beach grass, she seemed, blonde and freckled and clean-swept, a shy creature of the sand that had hidden her. Her arms and front felt hot and her curved back cool. She had been sunbathing. Her heart-shaped face was pink. ‘Hey? I’m glad you’re here?’ She was slightly panting and her voice excitedly lifted each phrase into a question. ‘I’ve been waiting in this dune with a pack of horrible boys without shirts whooping and yelling all around me; I was getting quite frightened?’

As if his manner of speech kept shifting around an unsayable embarrassment, he momentarily lapsed from hipsterism and spoke in a courtly way. ‘My poor brave lady. The dangers I expose you to. I’m sorry I’m late; listen. I had to buy the wine and then I tried to buy a corkscrew and these absolute idiots, these Norman Rockwell types in some run-down country store, tried to sell me an auger instead.’

‘An auger?’

‘You know. It’s like a brace and bit without the brace.’

‘You feel so cool.’

‘You’ve been lying in the sun. Where are you?’

‘Up here? Come.’

Before he followed her, Jerry kneeled and took off his shoes and socks. He still wore his city coat and tie and carried the wine bottle in its paper bag like a commuter walking home with a present. Sally had spread her red-and-yellow-checkered blanket in a sweeping hollow bare of any footmarks but her own. Jerry looked for the boys, and saw them several dunes away watching nervously with the sides of their heads, like seagulls. He stared at them boldly and murmured to Sally, ‘They’re young and look harmless. But do you want to go deeper in?’

He felt her nod at his shoulder, her nod like a word only she could pronounce, a uniquely rapid and taut jiggle of her head,
yes yes yes yes;
it was one of her mannerisms he found himself, in situations far removed from her, imitating. He gathered up her blanket and her braided beach bag and her book (by Moravia) and set them in her warm arms. As they walked up the slant of the next dune he placed his hand on her naked waist to steady her, and turned to make sure the boys had witnessed this sign of possession. Embarrassed, they were already whooping off in the other direction.

As usual, Jerry and Sally walked in and out, down ragged paths between scratching bayberry bushes and up slithering slopes, laughing with exertion, looking for the ideal spot, the spot where they had been the last time. As usual, they failed to find it and finally put the blanket down anywhere, in a concavity of clean sand that became, instantly, perfect.

He posed before her and stripped. His coat, his tie, his shirt, his trousers.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you wore a bathing suit.’

‘All the damn morning,’ he said, ‘and every time I felt the drawstring bite into my belly I thought, “I’m going to see Sally. I’m going to see Sally in my bathing suit.” ’

Letting his skin exult in the air, he stood surveying; they were hidden and yet themselves could see the parking lot below, and the tranced arm of sea held fast between here and Long Island, and the little glittering whitecaps hurrying in to break soundlessly on the streaked rocks.

‘Hey?’ she said from the blanket. ‘Come see me in your bathing suit?’

Yes yes, the touch, the touch of their skins the length of their bodies in the air, under the sun. The sun made his closed eyes swim in red; her side and upward shoulder warmed and her mouth gradually melted. They felt no hurry; this was perhaps the gravest proof that they were, Jerry and Sally, the original man and woman – that they felt no hurry, that they did not so much excite each other as put the man and woman in each other to rest. Their bodies sought with the gradualness of actual growth to enlarge and refine their fit. Her loose hair drifted strand by strand onto his face. The sense of rest, of having arrived at the long-promised calm centre, filled him like a species of sleep even as his insteps tightened upward into the arches of her feet: ‘It’s incredible,’ he said. He turned his face upwards, to merge her with the sun; red flooded his lids.

She spoke with her lips against his neck, where a
shadow was gritty and cool. He felt this, though it was her sensation. ‘It’s worth it,’ she said, ‘is what’s so surprising. It’s worth it, all the waiting, all the obstacles, all the lying and hurrying, and then when you reach it, it’s worth it.’ Her voice grew progressively small pronouncing this.

He experimentally opened his eyes and was blinded by a perfectly hard circle smaller than the moon. ‘Do you mind,’ he asked, his lids clamped on a pulsing violet echo, ‘the pain we’re going to cause?’

As if he had dropped a chemical, the stillness of her body against his changed quality. Her curved feet lifted from his. ‘Hey’ she said. ‘What about the wine? It’ll get warm.’ She rolled out of his arms, sat up, and brushed her hair back from her face, blinking and pushing the sand from her lips with her tongue. ‘I brought some paper cups because I knew you wouldn’t think of it.’ This tiny possessive insight made her licked lips smile.